PDF files larger than original documents.

When saving word documents (microsoft for mac) as pdf documents the resulting file is up to 10 times larger than the original. Taking the same document into a windows OS and using acrobat distiller results in the same document producing a much smaller pdf.

Is this a problem / feature with the mac OSX pdf creator or is it something to do with the microsoft software I'm running?

I have also tried this out with textedit and found that the resulting pdf is also larger than the original. Mac pdf creator seems a bit pointless if it is going to make files larger!!!!!

Is there some setting somewhere that I am missing?

Depends: Wird might be using the largest file size for images and may be embedding tables etc. as images instead of PDF objects.

Distiller is a very advanced tool that is speicifcally designed for this, so it's not really a fair comparison.

Take the PDF and open it in Preview. Then you can save as using the "reduce file size" Quartz option. Or open the Word document in Pages and there's also a quality setting.